Blog

This blog will focus mostly on my personal projects: what I'm doing, why I'm doing it, and perhaps how. I may occasionally blather about some external issue or event, but this will be mostly about coding in my pet projects.

Wow, it's been a long time! The fiction adventure took longer than I expected. I still have some unfinished sections to add to the novella. Maybe over the next several months I can get that wrapped up. I also got really busy with family things in the past month or so.

Eventually I got back to fixing up problems in Fluff. There is a Tiny Core Forum posting here that describes my new beta release. The changes were ready a little earlier, but I wanted to update my Fluff makefile to be able to do a persistent installation or an update of a persistent installation. I was side-tracked when I could not make tce-load to a persistent local installation. A remote "tce-load -wi whatever" will persistently install something from an official repo, but "tce-load -ic" will only temporarily install something. So I figured out how to add a basic form of installation and extension updating to the makefile.

Something fairly new to me: writing fiction rather than software. I have only tried once as an adult to write some fiction, an unpublished short story, a near-future tale of media terrorism. The new effort was prompted by John Michael Greer, in his blog "The Archdruid Report". It was this post specifically. I have begun working on a near-future coming-of-age romance in a mostly post-industrial world. It is currently novella-length, perhaps it will grow to a full novel. The beginning is here: Dissolution Day. It is written at perhaps the "Young Adult" level. PG stuff!

I excerpted part of it and expanded it slightly to make it stand better on its own and submitted it to John Michael Greer for consideration of publication in a short story anthology. That short story is "An Alliance Too Costly."

This fiction-writing project has absorbed all of my hobby Linux software developing time in the past several weeks, so if you came here for progress updates for software, I'm sorry about that. I hope you enjoy the fiction. I will get back to software, probably around the December/January holidays.

If you came here because of my fiction, and you are at all interested in Linux, please take a moment to review my original Linux apps. Of course, I you you enjoy the fiction as well!

Jakob has informed me that he needs to focus his resources
differently, including his time and the computing resources that support
the blog / code repository / bug ticket at his Retrospectiva system. So I’m beginning the
process of setting up repositories in GitHub for the projects that have
been hosted here. So far, I have Flume set up as a repository on GitHub (link: https://github.com/mlockmoore/Flume). I'll add my other projects there over the next several daysweeks months and post updates here.

Thanks Jakob for your support in the past and good luck with your future endeavors!

Tinycore Linux forum member Jur has been posting many discovered bugs and usability issues. I've tried to resolve them. Here is a short summary of the recent updates:

Version:0.9.2 - Prevents segfault from Fluff trying to respond to Paste menu or keyboard commands when there is nothing to paste.

0.9.3 - Prevents segfault from Fluff responding to filetype name changes when the filetype is not yet defined.

0.9.4 - Prevents Fluff responding to an unexpected Ctrl+Q event from a child application.0.9.4 - Prevents file details list updates in any 2.0 second period (flicker); won't do any updates if there is at least one item selected in the file details list (preventing loss of selection in that window)

These updates are on the Retrospectiva website, but I'll post a source snapshot and an installable extension on the Fluff page at this site. Hopefully version 0.9.5 (if not later) will appear in Tinycore Linux 3.6.

TinyCore Linux CoreTeam member Juanito is apparently trying to build Fluff for a 64-bit system. I've never done any significant 64-bit specific development before, so this could a good learning experience for me. But I'm not getting fully committed to it yet. I'm just trying to fix a few things that are broken when compiling for 64-bits. I'll let Juanito try it out. Version 0.9.1 of Fluff is posted now with the hopefully 64-bit-compatible code. Let's see if it works.

Based on user feedback, I have updated Fluff to version 0.8.6. One change is for a major bug: Fluff was not displaying many files if they shared a inode number with another file, which surprising to me, is quite common in TnyCore, what with all the overlapping mounts of squashfile archives. Another change is more cosmetic: don't repaint the screen if the inotify event is associated with a non-visible file/directory. This reduces annoying flicker. However, I just heard today of a new segfault crash report during copying use with FAT32 volumes. Hmmm. I'll see if I can reproduce that one soon.

The other development work was for FL-PicSee. I added code so it can be a drag-and-drop recipient. If you drag a file or set of image files from Fluff file manager to an open instance of FL-PicSee, FL-PicSee will add them to the set of files to display, and will show you the first of the dropped files. I also added a new "nice zoom" scaling mode... where it will adjust the scale to fit the available window size (or at least pretty close so you don't have to scroll much at all), but use a nice zoom ratio like 1:4 1:3, 1:2, 2:3 3:4, 1:1, 2:1. I also did some minor adjustments to the keyboard shortuts and menu wording.

Other than these primary projects, I also documented the steps I've taken to get this new Toshiba Satellite T215D netbook/ultralight working well with TinyCore. Some notable areas:

Xorg 7.5 with the proprietary ATI-FGLRX driver

Synaptics device configuration in xorg.conf to make the trackpad work well, including edge-scrolling (like in Windows 7 and Fedora 14)

cpufreqd power-management, using the powernow-k8 kernel module and a simplified cpufreqd config file

After failing to get working udev rules to disable my trackpad after
plugging in a mouse, I created my own monitor/manage script that does
the same thing

There's an area I have not yet documented publicly:

Created smarter wifi connection scripts that will retry if needed

I've also begun trying to learn to use the FLTK GUI design tool Fluid. I've used it to make a mock-up of my proposed FLAN (Fast Light App for Networking) program's user interface. I'd like to get back to that soon.

I have posted the source code and build package for Fluff version 0.8.5, as well as the latest version of Flume (0.9.2) and Flit (1.3.0 Beta 1). To clarify my previous post, I will no longer post the individual source code and build files here, but will post snapshots of the source and build files as gzipped tar archives (.tar.gz). I will also post installable extensions for TinyCore Linux here if you would like to beta-test them. Go to retrospectiva if you want to browse or download individual source code or build files.

TinyCore Linux forum member Jakob Bysewski has volunteered to help me with "useful and lightweight" free software projects and to host project management and source code control services to support that effort. Jakob has already contributed source code changes to Flit that add several new features, which are now part of Flit Version 1.3.0 Beta 1. Because of the many advanced capabilities, I will be using his "retrospectiva" site (http://retrospectiva.krautsoft.de/projects/useful-lightweight-software/blog) to manage my publicly-accessible source code. I will try to be a bit more transparent in my FLTK or other free-software development work at the retrospectiva site. I will still use this google site to publish pre-release TinyCore Linux extensions (.tcz files) and sourcecode "tarballs" (.tar.gz archives) and personal musings, but if you want to follow the development projects in detail, retrospectiva is the place to go.

Belated news: my beta version 0.6.0 of the Fluff file manager was accepted as an official part of the TinyCore Base version 3.3. I've been actively correcting, refining, and enhancing it since then. Fluff now exists at version 0.7.8 in my development machines. I will post a code and installation .tcz snapshot here sometime soon!

I've requested the latest source code be released as BETA software in the TinyCore Linux official repository. The application was not changed other than the version number. The .html Help file was edited with some cautions about BETA software usage. Maybe I will get more feedback from this a BETA software.